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Libel Claim Focuses on Circumcision

By Sewell Chan December 8, 2008 1:23 pmDecember 8, 2008 1:23 pm

Is it libelous to falsely report that someone is not circumcised?

That question is at the heart of an unusual lawsuit filed in United States District Court in Brooklyn recently against Centropa, the Central Europe Center for Research and Documentation, an oral-history project, based in Vienna and Budapest, that focuses on Jewish life and culture in the 20th and 21st centuries.
In the lawsuit, John F. Singer, 49, of Queens, claims that Centropa published an online interview in 2005 that quoted his mother saying that neither of her sons had been circumcised as infants. Mr. Singer asserts that he told the center’s director, Edward Serotta, that he was, in fact, circumcised as an infant, and that Mr. Serotta approved the publication of the article containing the incorrect claim anyway.

Mr. Singer said the article was “recklessly and/or intentionally republished” on Centropa’s Web site this year, when the site was redesigned, and that the claim about his not being circumcised remained online until October, when officials at the center finally deleted that part of the interview with Mr. Singer’s mother. The article, which City Room could not find online, was apparently focused on her experiences in Europe, not on her children. Mr. Singer told The Daily News, which reported on the lawsuit on Monday, that his mother denies telling Centropa that her sons were not circumcised.

“As a Jewish male, it is in direct contradiction to Jewish law to be uncircumcised,” the lawsuit noted. Dated Nov. 19, it accuses Centropa of “abhorrent, despicable and wrongful actions” that caused Mr. Singer “severe embarrassment, mental anguish and extreme emotional distress.”

The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages for emotional distress, as well as an injunction barring Centropa from publishing the claim again.

The lawsuit accuses Edward Serotta, director of a Jewish oral-history project, of approving publication of an inaccurate statement.

In an e-mail message to The Times, Mr. Serotta, who is based in Vienna, said he could not comment until he had first consulted with a lawyer. “Since this has come as a surprise and I only found out about this during the weekend, I am currently looking to hire an attorney in New York,” he wrote.

Mr. Serotta, who was born in Savannah, Ga., is an American author, photographer and filmmaker who has lived in Central Europe since 1988. While producing a documentary for ABC’s “Nightline” in 1999, he lamented the loss of Jewish cultural and culinary heritage in Central and Eastern Europe.

That led to the founding of Centropa, which has 90 full- and part-time staff members, more than a dozen trained interviewers and financing from numerous governmental and philanthropic bodies.

Experts on defamation and libel law said a judge evaluating the case would very likely consider several factors. A basic threshold issue in a defamation case is whether the statement was of a kind that would be damaging to someone’s reputation.

Saying that someone was not circumcised is not inherently damaging — unlike, for example, claiming that someone is a child molester — but Mr. Singer could argue that it was damaging to his reputation as a member of a Jewish community that regards circumcision to be a commandment.

A judge might nonetheless ask Mr. Singer to demonstrate that he was actually harmed by the claim and suffered some kind of material damage. Historically, New York has been more reluctant than other states to allow for protection of individual privacy by civil lawsuits; “public disclosure of personal information” is not something the state has generally recognized as a ground for damages.

Although the topic of circumcision is intensely private, a judge might find that the broad subject of Centropa’s interviews — Jewish life in Europe — is of broad public concern, which might make it harder for Mr. Singer to succeed. In New York, to prevail in a libel suit against a media defendant, a private person typically must demonstrate that the defendant acted with “gross irresponsibility” if the content of the article in dispute was of legitimate public concern.

Complicating the suit are the facts that the defendant is not based in New York and that the suit involved a mother’s claim regarding her son, even if that claim was later retracted.

Mr. Singer said in a statement provided by his lawyer, Michael J. Borrelli of Carle Place, N.Y.:

Centropa.org and its editorial staff have violated my right to privacy of the most private part of my anatomy. They have caused me tremendous emotional pain and suffering. I feel humiliated and betrayed. I was assured by Centropa’s director (Edward Serrota) that this material regarding my genitalia would never be published. Despite that assurance, they published it anyway.

I am proud to be uncircumcized. It is a central European tradition (I was born outside Stuttgart) as old as time itself to not put newborn infants through howling pain as their foreskin is needlessly cut off. My natural penis is nothing to be ashamed of, and I deeply resent the cultural forces, particularly in the United States, that stigmatize what has always been part of me and my body.

oh boy – yet another trivial religiously-based reason to get angry, hire lawyers, and generally beat each other up. i fail to understand what or why any ‘god’ would care about whether the foreskin of one’s penis was there – not there – or tatooed in flourescent green letters.

There are some ecological reasons that have been put forward i.e, net positive medical value and thus increased fitness, as explaining how circumcision became a fixed custom, along the same lines as the rules for kosher food. The issue here however isn’t about the circumcision as such, however, it’s about one’s identification, and identity, as a Jew, regardless of the rationale (medical or divine) for the procedure. So, Julian Knox, it’s hard to understand what it is you “deeply resent” unless you’re faced with this dilemma yourself as a Jew or Jewish parent. It has nothing to do with stigmatizing a body part or with the United States.

The lawsuit does sound pretty far-fetched legally however, but I’m not a lawyer.

Absolute nonsense! If he were uncircumcised he should be proud of the fact that he has a functional penis. When God created him, he was created with a good and functioning penis not the butchered thing he has between his legs. Any woman who has been intimate with both a cut and uncut penis will be able to tell you the difference.
The good Lord must wince every time a natural penis is cut in His name.
And Michael J. Borrelli should be ashamed to put his name to such pleadings.
Some day a circumcised man between the age of 18 and 21 (statute of limitations) will bring an action against the doctor who performed the circumcision, the parents who gave permission for it, the hospital which profited by it, and the insurance company that condoned it, then this outrageous practice will stop.

Actually, the obligation to circumcise is with the parents not the child (failure to do so is the parents’ sin, not the child’s–they’re the ones who failed to live up to the covenant), so Mr. Singer’s mother is the one with the standing in this lawsuit because she’s the one who was accused of a sin, not Mr. Singer, IMHO.

And, since a bris is a public event, I don’t think there’s an expectation of privacy in this case.

And the first two posters shouldn’t comment on things they apparently know nothing about. This lawsuit isn’t about whether circumcision is appropriate. It’s about whether the publication accused a mother of failing to uphold her religion’s covenant with G-d. By quoting her as saying she didn’t circumcise her sons, it was essentially quoting her as saying that she didn’t intend for her sons to be Jewish.

Well, if you’re Biblically inclined, the good Lord would not be wincing at all, since it is He who commanded Abraham to initiate the practice. Those who were not circumcised were to be ‘cut off’ from their people (Genesis 17:10-14). Regardless of your personal beliefs about the practice, circumcision is a religious commandment among Jews. If you are a male and you convert to Judaism, you must become circumcised. So the lawsuit has nothing to do with the rightness or wrongness of cutting a “natural penis,” it has to do with potential damage to a man’s reputation as a Jew within the Jewish community.

Bob said: “The issue here however isn’t about the circumcision as such, however, it’s about one’s identification, and identity, as a Jew, regardless of the rationale (medical or divine) for the procedure.”

I am Jewish, and was circumcised at birth by the obstretician. My mother did not want it done by a lay person.

It is done for health reasons; kosher laws were the start of medicine. People did not have microscopes, so they did not know about trichina worms. They did not know about bacteria and viruses in clams and oysters. Clams and oysters thrive in sewage. And they did not know about skin cancer.

They simply made observations, which were codified into laws which are still valid.

We are in the 21st century, and people are _still_ focused on idiotic things such as God, in all His grandeur and might, wanting all male Jews not to have a foreskin. What is amazing, of course, is that Mr. Singer is actually taken seriously, and not deposited in a mental institution to eliminate his focus on his penis. He’ll walk around, proudly expounding the virtues of his foreskin-less penis, reminding him of his tribe.

In this sense, Mr. Singer is no different than the Star Wars fans who stayed in line for six weeks, just to see a movie (that they could see, easily, a week later… or even on DVD.) Both types are absolutely nuts, but are taken seriously by society, the same society that pretends, for instance, to care for poor starving children: Ask the same people to work for free for six weeks to feed them, and they’d refuse. But live outside to see a movie? Sure, why not?

As an atheist, I’m amazed by the religious crowd to take their gods seriously: Gods that create this magnificent world, from the laws of physics, to the beauty of mathematics, and gods, who are also focused on whether I eat pork, masturbate, or even, God forbid, covet my neighbor’s wife!

Female circumcision is illegal in America but male circumcision is legal. Why is that? Both cause pain and suffering to an innocent who could later choose to have this procedure if desired.

Do parental religious preferences override individual rights to choose a whole body? (Those who take “spare the rod and spoil the child” to be a religious imperative are no longer allowed to practice their barbarism.)

And to think that this is a lawsuit, when substantial matters languish…

This is rather absurd. For starters, Mr. Serotta was publishing the claims of the plaintiff’s mother, and she is the source of any slander that may have occurred. Does the plaintiff intend to sue his own mother for damages concerning his reputation? Can the mother in fact prove beyond a preponderance of the evidence that Mr. Serotta fabricated her alleged failure to circumcise her sons? Does the other son intend to enjoin the lawsuit as a co-plaintiff? Most importantly, could this not be settled with a simple apology between adults?

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